I was loyal to T-Mobile for 10 years, but switching to Mint slashed my bill - by a lot

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Just a week ago, a T-Mobile outage affected thousands of customers nationwide, and depending on your choice of words when conversing with a service representative, you were compensated anywhere from $10 to $80 in bill credits. Fun, right?

Had I still been a part of the magenta family, I likely would've experienced the frustration of my in-laws, who were outside a concert venue that day, waiting to regain any bit of signal to validate their tickets in the 90-degree weather.

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Instead, I had already switched to Mint, a smaller but more humble conglomerate, after more than a decade as a T-Mobile customer. The decision was easy, and the lower price wasn't the only reason. Here's why you should probably change, too.

When it comes to picking a mobile service provider, big carriers like T-Mobile, Verizon, and AT&T seem like the obvious choices. The extensive marketing budgets, from billboard ads to celebrity cameos in TV commercials, the BOGO phone offers, and the switch-now deals are hard to ignore. The thousands of neon-lit stores don't make things easier.

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But those same deals and promotions are what lock you in, whether it's a three-year contract that charges you fees if you decide to terminate things (this is in the fine print, but how many people are actually reading it?), the "bill credits" that can be viewed as free money or compensation but really only exist to retain your membership, or the inability to unlock your phone until months, if not years, after consistent usage.

Between these commitments, customers often incur hidden fees. Some examples I've seen on my past bills include:

I stuck with T-Mobile for more than a decade because of the convenience (and the thought that switching away would be inconvenient). Through all the random fees, payment plans, and occasional network outages, I also found it easy to swing by a local store whenever I needed help setting up a device or switching to another.

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My plan also included the weekly freebies via the T-Life (formerly T-Mobile Tuesdays) app, such as $5 movie tickets and free photo prints (which came in handy for printing wedding photos for family and friends). There was also the discounted Netflix subscription, which brought the monthly price of an ever-expensive service down to $5.